Taxi Driver (Blu-ray)

(Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 4.5.2011)

Thirty-five years after its original release, what remains most unusual about Taxi Driver is the degree to which it invaded the culture, in spite of Paul Schrader and Martin Scorsese's wildly uncompromising filmmaking strategies. Not only is their treatment of race, gender, violence and sexuality far more provocative than anything you'd see in a Hollywood film today, but the film has a fractured, open-ended narrative that hints at all kinds of elusive thematic schema (most famously, The Searchers-referencing cowboy/Indian/girl triangle of Travis, Sport and Iris) in support of a nihilistic, borderline misanthropic vision of contemporary America. Box office poison by any standard -- except the standard of 1976.

Since Taxi Driver is inextricably linked to several real events -- from the political shooting that inspired it (Bremer/Wallace) to the political shooting that it inspired (Hinckley/Reagan) -- its status as an expressive work of art sometimes gets lost. But as even the most casual revisiting will confirm, this isn't just another reactionary vigilante movie from the seventies, it's a medium-shifting genre hybrid that boldly fuses stark realism with nightmarish subjectivity.

Time has been unusually kind to Taxi Driver. The further we get form the trash culture depicted onscreen, the more dated that culture seems -- which actually increases the film's impact. Once a particular brand of sleaze has disappeared from our surroundings, it achieves an even greater power to alienate. The very fact that the film's trashy reality is so unlike our own only causes the modern viewer to more fully identify with Travis Bickle's sense of dislocation.

Nonetheless, the film may leave you longing for a time when tasteless trash culture made no effort to conceal itself. Today's trash often drapes itself in legitimacy, making high and low culture indistinguishable at first glance. Unlike Travis Bickle, today's alienated psycho must navigate a world of misleading facades, rather than transparent ills. The lack of cultural ambiguity in the diseased New York of Taxi Driver gave Schrader and Scorsese the precision of context they needed to make sense of a character as complex as Travis Bickle. In 1976, most people had very definite, morally uncomplicated views about prostitutes, pimps, poverty and pornography (the four Ps), but now that this iconography has been diluted by several decades of ironic punchlines (in mainstream entertainment, no less), it's hard to imagine a modern investigation of these themes having anything approaching the impact of Taxi Driver.

On this new Blu-ray, Sony brings back the many impressive extras from their 1999 and 2007 DVD special editions (including several commentaries, featurettes and a feature-length documentary), but they've also managed the rare feat of convincing The Criterion Collection to license one of their old laserdisc commentaries (following their partnership on last November's incredible BBS box set, Criterion and Sony may be embracing a new spirit of teamwork). The only brand new feature on this disc is Sony's movieIQ functionality, which gives you the chance to watch the film with all kinds of distracting factoids onscreen.

As for the transfer, Taxi Driver looks just as gritty and grimy as you'd expect. By design, the dreamlike night sequences are dark, shadowy and occasionally somewhat muddy. However, there are also moments of startling visual clarity, particularly all that neon New York signage and the impressively detailed daytime exteriors. The transfer exhibits some inconsistencies in contrast, sharpness and color saturation, but this appears to be an accurate rendering of the film audiences saw in 1976 (Scorsese and cinematographer Michael Chapman both signed-off on the transfer). You certainly can't see any of the wear-and-tear that has plagued theatrical screenings in the decades since.

In a conversation with Robert Bresson shortly before the Cannes debut of Taxi Driver, Paul Schrader explained that the film's peculiar impact stemmed from Scorsese's decision to apply expressionist tendencies to an austere screenplay. The overall effect of the high-def upgrade on this disc is a more heightened, potent experience of that bold aesthetic experiment. If previous formats emphasized the film's austere roots, Blu-ray finally does justice to Scorsese's radical, unsettling expressionism. -- Jonathan Doyle